Feeding India: Prospects and challenges in the next decade

This chapter reviews the prospects and challenges facing India’s agriculture and fish sectors in the next decade. It briefly reviews sector performance, outlines the current context for markets, provides detailed quantitative medium-term projections for the ten-year period 2014-23, and assesses key risks and uncertainties. India’s main challenges in promoting sector growth and reducing its large number of food insecure people are discussed in the context of its various policies to address them, including minimum support prices, trade policy, input subsidies and its new National Food Security Act (NFSA). The chapter outlines a relatively positive scenario in which recent trends of higher production and consumption continue, offering India considerable potential to reduce the number of food insecure people over the next decade. The key risks to this scenario include India’s macro performance, its ability to effectively implement NFSA and the sustainability of productivity growth.